Ohyo – Collapsible Drinking Bottle

About 25 years ago, there were few things more pleasing in life than purchasing a Kinder egg, devouring the chocolate and discarding the instantaneously broken toy, and using the yellow plastic “yolk” as a cannon to fire at your friends. Or, fill it with water and use it as a water bomb. Even better!

Well, it’s with this ‘not what it was intended for’ mind on that we’ve discovered what is potentially the best use for the Ohyo, a renamed, re-designed version of the Aquatina that we reviewed many moons ago and has since become a bit of a British phenomenon.

The first version, the Aquatina, has a twist-off lid. It worked OK, but the addition of a flip-up spout makes the Ohyo potentially a single-handed affair, and affords the ability to transform it in to a water cannon! The technique takes a while to master, but with the correct fill, flip and squish, it’s possible to send a pretty accurate stream of water in to an unsuspecting friend’s ear.

Of course, there’s a slightly less… assertive reason for the Ohyo’s existence, and that is its inventor’s loathing of the waste and energy that goes in to the production of throw-away bottles of water. It takes 250ml of oil and 7 litres of water to make a single 1 litre bottle of water. That’s staggering. And scary.

The Wife is a particularly bad user of bottled water. We must have 10 perfectly good reusable bottles in our cupboard, but she still feels the need to purchase a litre of some posh french water whenever she drives anywhere. It drives me potty, so I am trying to stash the handy compressed Ohyo bottles shown above in her car as an aide-memoir to save the planet.

Anyway, on with something resembling a review: The Ohyo is a 500ml (can and a half of coke) bottle which compresses like a concertina when it’s empty so it takes up less pack space or can be shoved in a pocket. It’s a great idea. In real-life terms it isn’t the most comfortable thing to carry in your hand, and could do with an attachment method (you could, I suppose, jerry-rig a lanyard around one of the indentations), but they’ve been selling like hot cakes in some very major retailers so they’re clearly on to a good thing.